


swing that razor high

by cosmogyral



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fusion, F/F, F/M, M/M, Mayhem, Murder, Sweeney Todd - Freeform, Troll Romance, abuse of the present progressive
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-03-25
Updated: 2011-03-25
Packaged: 2017-10-17 06:35:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 5
Words: 4,559
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/173955
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cosmogyral/pseuds/cosmogyral
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Attend the tale of Sweeney Troll.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> In my head, this is a troll romantic comedy.
> 
> PS: If you are one of the eight hits that read this while I was writing and editing the final chapter, you might want to come back now. AO3, get a better draft system.

He nearly stalks right past her store, but that won't do, really it won't. For a redblooded young gentleman he's always been very quick to ignore the advice of his betters. It's what she first got the reds for, back when she was only a girl herself, the way he was surly with everyone, his matesprit as red as he was but quicker to blush, his yellow moirail, and the kismesis who pushed his way into his life with all the arrogance only the blues can manage. Judge Zahhak, who threw away one to have the other. Zahhak's an idiot. Terezi knows. He'll never have Aradia, not as long as Terezi keeps the automata in her attic, wound down and twitching with remembered rage, and she thought for sure he'd never have Vantas, either, but here he is. He doesn't recognize her, of course. He will, though.

He eats what she puts in front of him, and then puts his fork down and informs her that they are the worst pies in the whole city, possibly on the whole planet. He adds that he's not sure how she's stayed in business longer than an hour, and is about to cast aspersions on the fact that she's a green shopkeeper of all things, before she cuts him off with a hand over his mouth. "So it is you, Karkat Vantas," she says, grinning at him. "Don't you smell as angry as possible."

"Don't call me that," he spits, and shoves her hand off him. "Karkat Vantas is dead. His Honourable Go Fuck Himself saw to that when he shipped him off to the mines sweeps ago."

"And killed his matesprit," Terezi adds, agreeably, and is rewarded by the unusual sound of Vantas' resounding silence.

She tells him the whole story, of course, or most of it -- a girl has to be excused for leaving out circumstantial evidence. She shows him his old room. He tells her it's as hideous as always, and stalks around it, and then collapses into a chair in the center of the room and cries like he's a grub, and then he gets up again and tells her, "I'm going to be a barber."

"Why a _barber?_ " she wants to know, wrinkling her nose, and Vantas says, "Because that's how lower-class scum get their hands on razors."

As she tells the automata, folding its hands carefully together, it's an extremely good revenge plan. Its benefit is in its simplicity, and its targeting of the guilty, and in the part where Karkat gets to cut their throats. It brings custom into the shop, though only in passing. All he has to do is market himself properly. Terezi'll take care of that for him. Terezi has a knack for taking care of things that Karkat will learn sooner or later to appreciate. He calls her the worst auspistice and she laughs at him, because oh Karkat, showing his usual talent for getting the point.

The charlatan in the market is a stroke of luck. He claims his name is Spinneret Mindfang, and he has his little assistant bite him to show off his purple blood, but that's a trick Terezi's seen a million times with food coloring. He says he can shave closer than any land-dweller with his blade that turns only to the hand of a powerful psychic.

"Did you give your girl her harelip, then?" Karkat yells up at the stage. "Because I can tell you that's a lot closer than I'll shave, particularly on a lady."

The crowd loves this, and suddenly it's come to a competition, Karkat vaulting up there and the girl saying, "Sir, sir, you oughtn't." He rolls his eyes at Mindfang's posturing, flicks open a razor, slices two neat lines down either side of his face and removes the gills, which don't bleed at all. He holds them up to the crowd. "This is your royal barber," he says. "Fine accessories. Are they made from real fish, or is that stench you?"

Then he ruins it by adding, "You look like a goat, you know," and Mindfang _hurls_ himself at Karkat, beating him to the ground left-handed, and they're left with the dubious honor of being the best barber in town easily defeated in a fist-fight by a man who can't even keep his gills on.

Karkat is furious, of course. When is he not? He's madder when the charlatan makes him kneel, and when the charlatan whistles for Nepeta and Nepeta pats Karkat on the head, very gently, before scampering off in her master's wake. He's shaking with rage when Terezi climbs up onto the stage and puts an arm around him. She removes her monocles, one after the other, and tilts her head so that his forehead is touching his.

"You looked like a fool," she says, her voice breathy with laughter. "Do you need me to help you up?"

" _Fuck_ you. I don't need anyone's help," Karkat growls, his fists clenching and unclenching. "What I need is Equius Zahhak's blood."

"Well, we can get you _that_ , Mr. Vantas," Terezi says, wrapping her hands around his. "We can _certainly_ get you that. But you'll have to stand up first, you know."

Karkat shakes his head against Mindfang's weak little compulsion, but can't move. He's adorable like this. She sighs and pulls him upright, very carefully. "Come on," she says. "Let's go back to the shop, and tonight, Mr. Vantas, we'll drown Equius Zahhak in a river of his own blood, and then I'll make you a cake."

He likes half of this idea very much.


	2. Chapter 2

The trick is patience, patience, a word Karkat hates by the time the green moon sets on the day. He's banging around the house when she leaves with a bottle of ale and he's still banging around when she comes back empty-handed with a smile. She tells him, patience. Brother Makara will do his job, eventually, or she'll keep plying him with ale until he forgets himself otherwise, and Equius Zahhak always listens to his priest's advice, no matter how trivial, no matter how ridiculous -- what an odor of sanctity about him, and him from one of the best families.

"Cheap excuses," Karkat growls. "I want his throat."

Eventually she resorts to locking him in the upstairs flat, leaning against the front of the door as he pounds against the back. "You can't get through that way, Mr. Vantas," she yells to him, and listens to him sharpen his razors.

He rails about the unfairness of his life until she's got it all by heart. Sollux Captor, the yellow-blooded moirail who's not been seen since Karkat went to the mines, and she remembers the look in his eyes when he mostly heard about Aradia and mostly doesn't tell him about Sollux, either. Eridan Ampora, the sorry excuse for royalty who found Karkat floundering in the acid seas and gave him a ride back to land because it'd be less satisfying to kill the land-dwellers one at a time. He's busy yelling about a miner who worked until his legs snapped under him when she hears the jingle of the doorbell, and goes down the stairs, letting him rant away behind her.

"If you're here for the barber," she tells Mindfang, sweetly, "you'd better wait till you grow a beard first."

Mindfang's razor is clutched in his hands and his girl is at his heels. He pushes his way into the shop, turning around and around. "This place is a dump," he says, with a sneer, and up close he smells like an old memory, salt and malice and iron. "I didn't think you'd ever sink so low."

"I don't know what you mean, I'm sure," says Terezi, and sniffs her again.

She shoves Nepeta in with her unruly barber and takes Mindfang up the stairs to the attic. "Vriska Serket," Terezi says, shutting the door firmly behind her, "you're a public menace."

"We used to be good together," Vriska wheedles, letting her affected tenor disappear like nothing. "We used to be so good. You were black for me, weren't you? Like a spade. We could have razed buildings with how much you hated me."

"That was before you took out my eyes."

"And you took my arm," Vriska says, her left hand clutching for Terezi's. "I want you back, Pyrope! The drone's coming soon and I want _you_! You're almost good enough for me!"

"You never wanted me," Terezi hisses, and she might be losing her precious self-control, but then it's tricky to be self-controlled when you're bearing up under Serket's petty continuous mental assaults, like a tide of ants. She guides herself across the room to the burlap and steel pile in a corner. "You wanted her."

"What was her name, Wendigo? Megatherium?" Vriska shakes her head, still a terrible liar. "She was a mistake, she was a mistake! She was already taken by the judge. I'd never throw you over for her now. I know better than that!"

And all of a sudden Terezi gets one of her ideas, her best today. She says, "We-ll. Come help me with this, then, won't you?"

Vriska practically runs across the room, tugging the burlap away. "What is it," she says, "a doomsday--" and then she starts babbling her name, over and over, "oh my god, Aradia, Aradia," and Terezi, who knows proof positive when she sees one, hefts her cane and brings it down.

The blood covers every other smell in the room.

She finds her way back downstairs by sense of touch alone and manages the key in the lock. The girl says, "What are you wearing, miss?" and that's how Terezi realizes she's probably covered in Vriska's blue blood, and has to disabuse Karkat of the notion that she killed the judge herself.

"What are we going to do about it?" Karkat wants to know. "Because she stunk bad enough while she was alive and she'll smell twice as rotten now she's dead."

The bell rings before Terezi can answer, and she totters down the stairs still half noseblind and this time it _is_ luck after all, because Zahhak has come calling.

He doesn't recognize her, too busy beating off the beggarman from the street. He follows her up to the flat. The girl's nowhere to be heard, and Karkat's stropping his razor in the corner.

"My priest," Zahhak says, stiffly, "has ordered me to have more contact with the lower classes. My lusus has recently passed and I require a shave."

"I can give you the closest shave on Alternia," says Karkat, with a bright smile, and gestures to the chair.


	3. Chapter 3

It's the girl who ruins everything. She knows the judge somehow, and he knows she's a greenblood. He bolts out of his seat and takes a hold of her, his fingers raising deep bruises under her collar and a thumbprint on her chin, and that tears it. "I am not patronizing an institution where the social order is thus disrupted," he thunders, banging down the stairs. "You will have none of my custom. Good day to you, sir!"

She's struggling to breathe through her bruised throat when Karkat puts down his razor, methodically, and begins shattering every shatterable in the room. He starts with his ivory washbasin, which cost her fifty shillings or more thirty years ago, and he moves onto to his cups and his few plates, the girl scampering down the stairs in fright, and he's got his hand raised to the mirror before he looks at the pottery in his hand and stops, baffled, to pick it out. The whole room's coated in a thin, hazy smell of red, and the taste of her own blood and Vriska's in her mouth keeps her from scenting him come up behind her until he's put both hands on her shoulders. "This is your fucking fault," he says, and then, when she doesn't move, "Hoy. Mrs. Pyrope. Look at me."

She tilts her head back to him, her monocles resettling cold against her skin, and he says, "This is _still_ your fault," but it's not to the point anymore. He hefts her upright and moves her down the stairs, into her kitchen, where he runs cold water over a cloth and pushes it up against her throat.

"Didn't your lusus teach you not to fuck with blue-bloods?" he asks her, his voice low and sardonic. "It's the first thing he told me."

"Then we're both terrible students, Mr. Vantas," she says, and leans her head against his shoulder, breathing it in. "What are we going to do about Vriska Serket?"

"Vriska--" He squints down at her. "Your corpse."

"My corpse," she says, and it's thinking of it that way, or the sweet scent of his blood in her nose, or the half-feral girl that's nowhere to be found that gives her the plan. Why should Vriska go to waste? Why should anyone? She thinks of Vriska's long-dead spider and laughs. It's what she'd call poetic justice, if she'd ever had a taste for poetry.

He loves it. He actually smiles. "They think we gutterbloods drink noble blood and eat noble flesh anyway," he tells her. "I'm sure they must be fine cuisine," and he lets her dance him around the kitchen without putting up too much of a fight. She says, "Tell me again I'm the worst auspisitice ever, Mr. K."

"You're the worst," he tells her. "But then I don't have any better."

The girl's still waiting outside on the stoop, hunched in on herself. She expects to be sent away. Vriska never gave her anything but a boot to the small of the back, and that's a crime when Nepeta's such a sweet girl, and so bloodthirsty. She likes the plan, too. She calls it hunting.

Terezi's very careful. She picks the finest and the cruelest, no one lower than green, no one less guilty than sin, and she leads them up to Karkat's chair, where he runs the razor blade across their throats and complains about the mess. He even hacks them up for her, when she demonstrates what happens when she tries. She particularly likes adulterers, who go up to look clean for an assignation and come back down neatly shaven and in four easy pieces. Nepeta loads the grinder, though she doesn't think much of the cooking. Terezi makes the pies.

Only the beggarman on the street has any quarrel with her now, the beggarman and Zahhak, who finds their little organization distasteful. It doesn't matter. Zahhak goes to Brother Makara for counsel, and the beggar goes to Brother Makara for food, and as long as she keeps Brother Makara steadily supplied with draughts of ale, he won't give them any trouble. He preaches love. Zahhak takes it as a sign and turns his attention to his ward. The beggar takes it to heart, and sits on the stoop of the opposite shop, arguing furiously with himself about the correct way forward.

And they sell and sell and sell and sell.

The rumors stop being rumors. The drone's in town, wandering from house to house, looking for pails to fill. She spends her stolen time doing her best coquette at Karkat, but if he isn't impervious, though she flutters for hours. He's a good moirail for a girl like her, steady work, good hand with a sharp edge, sharper tongue. It'll do for now. It'll do until it doesn't, till he says Aradia's or Sollux's name one too many times and she takes that razor of his in hand. Well, it'd fill one of the pails, anyway.

"Mr. Vantas," she says to him, "I want us to look into a colony ship."

"Mrs. Pyrope, you can go fuck yourself," he says. It isn't actually a no.


	4. Chapter 4

"Mrs. Pyrope," says the girl one day, well before the civilized hour of sunset, "there's a lady here. To see the barber, ma'am."

"Well, send her on in, then," Terezi says, and gently locks the door to the upstairs. There's no need to encourage the kind of bloodshed Karkat's liable to cause should he be awoken before dark.

It's a jade-blooded lady, her face composed, her hands gloved. It's not her fault that Terezi's a nosy girl and can smell the too-cheap perfume on her, the stain of lipstick that's probably long since become invisible. She tells Terezi that in her line of work, ever so unspecific, she sees strange things. That she's reason to know that a purple-blood and a blue-blood are having some hatred out over a girl whose color is a hushed secret, and that this shop is known as a place where secrets go to disappear. She wonders, gently, if perhaps Mrs. Pyrope and Mr. Vantas might consider harboring another servant until she can be moved to a safer place.

Terezi leans across the table. "If Judge Zahhak's ward is so preciously afraid," she demands, "why's it a street club telling us to take care?"

The jade-blood protests, even as she blushes a dirty green. Young Feferi Zahhak had no lusus, and has no friends. She relies on whomever she can speak to.

"Well, then," Terezi sighs. "How old's the girl?"

With a note of pleasure in her voice that's almost embarrassing, the jade-blood says, "Still wet behind the ears."

"Let her come," Karkat says. He takes a seat behind her. "And before you ask, Mrs. Pyrope, I made my own key after the third time you locked me in. We have room."

"My partner and I need to speak for a moment," Terezi says. "There are nuances to the--"

"Bring her tonight!" he roars, slamming a hand down on the table. "The subject is closed."

The jade-blood's evidently more desperate than she looks. "Tonight."

And she does, she comes that night, with Feferi Zahhak cloaked and sorry and huge-eyed, but closer inspection reveals those are goggles. Nepeta takes her upstairs, talking so fast that little Zahhak can barely get a 'yes' or 'no' in. Karkat pays the jade-blood extravagantly, and then sits down at the kitchen table to write a letter.

"Oh," Terezi breathes, as the words waft towards her. "Oh, Mr. Vantas. That's extremely clever."

"You don't have to sound so fucking shocked," Karkat says, his hand trembling over his signature. "I am absolutely full up with brilliant ideas."

"I wouldn't go so far," she says, perching on the table to blow the letter dry. "But it looks like I'm a good influence."

In the twilight, she picks up her pails and saunters outside, to where the beggarman lies in his rags. She hesitates before kicking him awake, and when he blinks up at her with those particolored eyes she's slammed with mingled pity and revulsion, just like last year, just like every year. "Take a pick, love," she says. "I'm not choosy."

"I can't sleep," he says. "I wasn't asleep. There are too many people."

Last year he'd been going to Father Makara's sermons, and the sopor had almost kept the beggarman sane. He'd remembered everything she hadn't done. He'd taken the spade and they had gone to it on her narrow bed, both of them seeing black, black, black. That was before Mr. Vantas came home and she began beating him away from the door with a broom.

He hisses, and sits up, waving off an invisible defender. He reaches for the pail with the heart.

She laughs, and yanks it back a little. "Not out here," she says. "We are a civilized household."

He looks at her with flattering pity. He tells her, "So many people die here tonight."

This, she considers, is an excellent omen. "Come up to the attic," she suggests. "I have something to get you in the mood."


	5. Chapter 5

She leaves the little attic at twilight. The beggarman's asleep on her bed, curled in on himself under a flea-marked blanket. He's covered in scratches and she's covered in his scent, and both of them have gotten their blood all over Aradia and her box, but that's no matter. The pail's full, and downstairs, the judge is knocking.

He's knocked the door open, as a matter of fact. The letter is in his fist, crushed to a disastrous remnant of its former self. "What is this foolishness?" he demands. "Where is my ward? You will answer me at once, lowblood, or so help me you will face the consequences by my own hand!"

"Judge Zahhak," Terezi says, sweetly. "Should I read you the letter again?"

"'Most honorable judge Zahhak, Miss Feferi has fled to my premises'," Karkat says, from the kitchen. He is washing his hands. "'If you come tonight you'll have what you deserve.' Or something along those lines."

Terezi beams. "That was very accurate, my pet."

"Go fuck yourself. She's upstairs," Karkat says. She can't see how anyone could be fooled by him, his blood rushing at such a pace through his veins, his heart throbbing faster than ever. "She isn't contrite. I think it's that tart you went to. You get what you pay for, my lord."

"These efforts to taunt me must cease," the judge says. His brow is damp. "You seek to inflame me. No one has dared to do so for many years."

Karkat throws a look at Terezi, baffled and nauseous and scared, and Terezi smiles. "And what if he does, my lord?" she says, in her shopgirl's tone, high and wheedling. "The drone is coming. Isn't he owed a little something? You've said a hundred times you hate this establishment. It's a short step from that to a pail, isn't it?"

"We will discuss these disgusting advances when I've claimed the girl!" the judge snaps, but he's not looking at Karkat any longer, and Terezi lets him shove past her and stomp up the stairs, to the room where Feferi waits, Nepeta standing guard, where the razor sits in its silver dish. Karkat follows after, and the door shuts behind him.

There is, eventually, a scream.

Terezi begins tidying up the shop. The colony ship; she's decided it. After she's presented Karkat with the pail with the spade, after the drone has been and gone, after the judge is nothing but a memory of savor. She thinks she'll let Nepeta come with them. She's a good girl, a little sweet on Karkat, and it'll be good to have balance.

The scream, she thinks, absently. She hadn't imagined the judge to sound so sorry. Or so far away.

... As far as the attic.

She takes the steps three at a time, trips and slams into one at the landing, and flings the door open to hear Judge Zahhak die with a choked off gasp and no scream at all.

The scent of the room comes into her nose with her first huge breath, the blue blood richer than Vriska's and more hearty, strangely acidic underneath. Karkat lets Equius drop, and lifts his hands, with the razor still in it.

Eventually, he says, "Is that Aradia?"

Of course it's Aradia. It's the remains of Aradia, sparking out little puffs of smoke with every wire Zahhak's ripped open to the air. The remains of what Zahhak built for her, trying to keep the girl he'd killed with his first embrace; the remains of what didn't work well enough to speak or walk or move but worked well enough to keep her soul. Terezi loved her and saved her, too, didn't she? a shell with a fading ghost? oiled her joints, lifted her lids to check for any sign of life? kept her wound and well so that she could scratch those deep lines in the side of the trunk? so that she can reach now for Zahhak's body and then lose control of her arms, so that she can hiss out half a name before she loses her grip again?

"Well, that explains a lot," Karkat says, dispassionately, and turns around. Aradia doesn't scream, either. She simply goes.

Terezi doesn't even have time to cover her mouth.

Karkat is kneeling by her side. "Pyrope. Come on. Stay with me. I can't be angry with you if you're going to hang yourself for it first." When she doesn't answer, he tries to laugh. "Well, it's official now. You've let me kill my kismesis. You might as well not be my auspistice at all."

That wakes her up, enough to turn her head to him and smile, though it's not the smile she prides herself on, not nearly enough teeth to be getting on with. "Might be," she says.

He grins a little at her. "Hold on. I have to take care of another one of your corpses."

"Another one?" she asks. She keeps track, she's sure she does, she doesn't leave them littered around like mice.

He stands over the bed, hefting the beggarman in both his arms. "I had to stab him," Karkat says. "When I came in. He was babbling about--" and breaks off, and drops the body, and throws up.

That's how she knows he must have seen the yellow blood.

When Karkat's done, she's already out of the room, leaning hard against the locked door. She listens to the howling. _\--kill you, Pyrope, I should've know you're nothing but a noose and a nightmare, I should've had you locked up when we met, why didn't you have the goddamn decency to kill me too or is that too easy for you because I can tell you if you come back in here I'll start with the remains of your eyes and eat them straight out of your head--_

She ought to leave him in there. She ought to leave him in there and run. He can't get out, she made that door to keep in automata, it'll hold in a mutant. And anyway, he'll go stark staring mad before long, there with the bodies of his moirail and his matesprit and his kismesis and the girl he said was his auspistice locking the door behind her. She gets up to go.

For the third time that night, she hears a heavy knock on the door.

This time, there's the acrid stench of the drone behind it.

* * *

When the drone leaves, it leaves them tangled on the ground floor. She's broken a finger from the stairs. He's lost a tooth.

She crawls away from him. Pity's flooding back, crowding out the disgust. They're both still young. They say it happens.

"When did he go mad," Karkat says. He doesn't seem to be able to manage the energy for the question. "Sollux. When did he."

She laughs, though it hurts where she's cracked a rib. "When you left."

"So," Karkat says, experimentally. "Besides the fact that you've betrayed me in ways I didn't think were possible, I did all of this."

"Of course you did, Mr. Vantas," Terezi says. "You're a proper figure of a troll."

It's his turn to laugh, as he climbs to his feet. "Attend the tale of Karkat Vantas," he says, with bitter scorn. "The drone will be back for my red pail soon enough, and then I'll just be a cautionary figure."

Terezi smiles at him. She's got her smile back, it seems. "Now, Karkat," she says. "Don't you know by now I'll take care of you?"


End file.
